Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Today just a little trick that I needed when I started to customize SharePoint sites with FrontPage 2003. One of the first things you'll probably be doing when you want to alter how a SharePoint site looks, is deleting some table rows and cells from the default SharePoint layout. Sometimes it happens that you (accidentally?) delete one element too much… (at least it happened to me!). A tricky one to get back is the SharePoint navigation bar on top of the screen. To imitate the “real” one you can paste following HTML into your page:
<table class="ms-bannerframe" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%" height="25px">
  <tr>
     <td class=ms-banner width=100% nowrap ID="myNavigationBar" valign="middle">
       <!--webbot bot="Navigation"
                S-Type="sequence"
                S-Orientation="horizontal"
                S-Rendering="html"
                S-Btn-Nml="<a ID='onettopnavbar#LABEL_ID#' href='#URL#' accesskey='J'>#LABEL#</a>"
                S-Btn-Sel="<a ID='onettopnavbar#LABEL_ID#' href='#URL#' accesskey='J'>#LABEL#</a>"
                S-Btn-Sep="&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;"
                B-Include-Home="FALSE"
                B-Include-Up="FALSE"
                S-Btn-Nobr="FALSE"
                U-Page="sid:1002"
                S-Target -->
     </td>
  </tr>
</table>

But you can be a little more creative too by creating your own navigation bar. From the Insert menu in FrontPage, choose the “Navigation…” menu item. A new window will show up in which you can choose what type of navigation bar you want; for now let’s choose a “Bar with custom links”.

Click Next so you can choose the style in which you want to display the navigation links. In the last screen of the wizard you select the orientation of the navigation bar (I’ve chosen vertical). In the link bar properties window you can add links to the navigation bar; if you choose “SharePoint Top NavBar” you’ll get all the links of the default navigation bar. That’s it, The vertical navigation bar is finished! If you want do dig deeper into SharePoint customization with FrontPage, take a look at Yves Kerwyn's blog post about this topic.

Some people are wondering if it’s possible to display the contents of a SharePoint list that resides on another SharePoint site. Yes this is possible, even better: I’ll show you how to accomplish this! Suppose you have a SharePoint Task list on your root site that contains some tasks. You also have a sub site on which you want to display the contents of the Task list of the root site. First of all you need to create the Task list on the root site of course.

Next create the sub site, if you haven’t create it yet. We’re going to use FrontPage 2003 to accomplish our task, so fire up FronPage 2003 and open the sub site. We want to display the tasks on the start page of that site, so open default.aspx as well. From the Data menu choose the “Insert Data View…” menu item. In the Data Source Catalog task pane you’ll see a list of available data sources on the current site (Sub Site), of course the tasks are not in that list. On the bottom of the task pane, click “Manage catalog…”, a new window is displayed in which we can enter additional data sources. Click the Add button and enter the url of the root site as location, and choose a description for this data source. Close the window by clicking the OK button. Now you can use the task pane to browse to the data sources located on the root site!

Finishing off is very easy: drag and drop the task list from the Data Source Catalog to the web part zone, that’s it. If you want to you can alter the view (e.g. add or remove some columns), when you’re done don’t forget to save the page. The result is that you have a nice formatted web part that shows the tasks from a list on another site:

As you can see data sources are very powerful in FrontPage 2003 and SharePoint. This time we've used a SharePoint list as a data source, but you can use several other types of datasources for example web services. Don't underestimate the power of FrontPage 2003! :-)

Is hard to keep up with the new releases of documentation, updates, ... Microsoft (and others) is releasing each day. Here are the new ones I discovered this morning:

• Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Online Documentation (Last updated: April 2, 2004)
  BizTalk Server 2004 Help is updated on a quarterly basis. Each release of BizTalk Server 2004 Help includes more in-depth information, updates and corrections, and new topics in areas such as migration, deployment, and samples.
• BizTalk Server 2004 Tutorial
  The BizTalk Server Tutorial contains detailed information about how Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 can be used within your company to facilitate Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and among business partners to automate business-to-business processes.
• BizTalk Orchestration Naming Conventions 
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Help
  Help for using the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Administrator's Guide
  Guide for installing, configuring, managing, and maintaining Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
• SharePoint Configuration Analyzer v1.0 for Windows SharePoint Services
  SharePoint Configuration Analyzer is a diagnostic tool that verifies settings on your server that are critical to running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and to hosting Web Parts on your server.
• SharePoint Document Library Event Handler Toolkit
  The SharePoint Document Library Event Handler Toolkit introduces developers to the Windows SharePoint Services list events feature for document libraries. The download consists of two projects, SampleEventSinks and the WSS Event Monitor. The SampleEventSinks project contains several sample event sinks; the WSS Event Monitor is a stand-alone application that will display events as they occur on a document library. [via Mark Harrison]

Patrick Tisseghem loves creating SharePoint webparts using ASP.NET user controls, in one of his latest posts he simplifies this technique by using the dynamically compiled assembly (that is build the first time the user control is rendered on an ASP.NET page) which contains the user control. He even made a video that shows step-by-step how this works! Thanks Patrick for the free U2U course! ;-) I think this process could be even more simplified (as Patrick suggests) by using a utility that would compile the ASP.NET user control, without having to render that user control on a web form. I don’t know the compiler parameters that should be used to emulate what ASP.NET does, maybe someone else can help us out? My first experiences in a test environment were quite positive (after referencing the right assemblies :-). The procedure feels a little bit weird (you rely on ASP.NET to compile the user control), but there has to be a cleaner way to get a hold of the assemblies you need…

In a comment Renaud Comte describes even another approach to use user controls to create webparts. He compiles the user control as an embedded resource and uses a generic container. I’ve haven’t tried this technique, but if you’re intresed I recommend to read his blog post which also has a link to the full source code.

The BizTalk team has kept it's promise, the documentation and SDK updates are available! Additionally, the Installation Guide and Orchestration Designer for Business Analysts (Visio Add-in) are also published today.

• BizTalk Server 2004 Product Documentation
  Download the updated product documentation Help file to have new content for BizTalk Server 2004 on your desktop. The production documentation is updated on a quarterly basis.
• BizTalk Server 2004 SDK Refresh
  The BizTalk Server 2004 SDK Refresh contains updates and additions to samples, utilities, headers, and other developer artifacts to aide in the development of BizTalk Server 2004 applications.
• BizTalk Server 2004 Installation Guide
  Learn how to install BizTalk Server 2004 on a single computer or on multiple computers, with the information in this document.
• Orchestration Designer for Business Analysts
  Visio Add-In that enables Business Analysts to create business orchestrations that can be implemented using BizTalk Server 2004.

Update 3th of April

• BizTalk Server 2004 Rollup Package 1
  The BizTalk Server 2004 Rollup Package 1 provides a cumulative rollup of updates that have been offered since the release of BizTalk Server 2004.

If you're into SharePoint Customization, check out this article on the FrontPage 2003 Customization Kit site. Did you ever wonder which item on a SharePoint site maps with which CSS style? This site has for each type of SharePoint page (e.g. default home page, documents page, events page, ...) an image with tooltips that gives you this information!

“Now that you know that CSS is at the heart of FrontPage Themes, you will need a way to tell which element is affected by which style. For example, if you want to change the formatting of the Web site title that appears on each page (by default it says "Team Web Site") you will need a way to find out that the .ms-titlearea style changes the formatting of that line on each page.  The links below send you to pages that allow you to hover your mouse over a particular area and then see the styles used to create that section's formatting. For example, if you click the link below to the default home page and then hover your mouse over the "Team Web Site" heading, the tool tip will tell you that .ms-titlearea is the style that changes the formatting for this page title.  Similarly, if you click that heading, you will see the area affected when you change the .ms-titlearea style in the Theme.”

The article also has a section that explains how to change the CSS styles with FrontPage 2003. Thanks to Amanda you can even use a script on her blog that does this trick for your own sites.